I have been addicted to linux from 2003. Started with Suse back then and then moved to Ubuntu. I have been running from pillar to post ever since. Really like debian (various versions, and in fact too many versions, and if they could figure out how to tell the uses to use "this is the one u need" instead of stable, testing, unstable, experimental, still-dreaming, etc...) and fedora core 4- Fedora 9. Fedora cores were bad for me since thats when I started learning linux.I am one among those who is ready to sacrifice cutting edge for stability. Debian would have been my natural choice because I really like deb and apt.

Any way, I stumbled upon centOS on a friend's system and really liked it. I saw that yum has become really responsive. I now know that its faster than yum in fedora 9. I instantly got my nvidia 8600 up and running. Wiki has been really helpful to get sun Java working.

You reading from a, so far, very happy user.

I have some concerns as well. I need latex and texlive is not there in the repos. Tetex3 is the end of it. Sigh !...it's ok. I can install that directly from ctan. I had some difficulty in getting x86_64 java working. so then I got the 32 bit and working. I would like to go back and redo 64b and will post my experience later.

As has been said, CentOS is quite similar to Debian stable. Packages are intensively tested before going in, rather than like Fedora, where things are often put in to see how they will work. (That's not a putdown of Fedora, this philosophy is more or less stated on their pages.)

Apt has always seemed quicker to me than yum, although actually, F9 and F10 have improved yum's speed. Many times, in the end, we pull out technical reasons to justify what is, in the end, either an emotional or practical (for example, support is there for distro1 and not distro2 for some mission critical application) reason.

All that being said, the nice thing about CentOS is that it's almost a set it and forget it O/S. You can spend much more time worrying about the apps that you're running on it while the O/S itself runs smoothly. Our problems at work are almost never with the O/S itself.

I concur with the general comments here.. including 'yours truly' started spamming the board already

I use ubuntu as well once in a while. RHEL (@ shcool), centOS and Debian (@ office). Scottro said it right. I have a good system now. Have to set up some stuff that I use constantly and will post back in appropriate forums.